VOLUME 28, NUMBER 8
SEPTEMBER 24-OCTOBER 7, 2015
OLD TYPE OF FIGHT FOR NEW 9/11 MONEY BY JOSH ROGERS ou can’t say there’s a flood of 9/11 money again, but the faucet is back on. The evidence was clear last week as a few hundred people — some well-connected, others far from the public eye — waited to make their pitch to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. for a slice of a new $50 million fund. Madelyn Wils, a former L.M.D.C. board member who now heads the Hudson River Park Trust, stood in line at the Fiterman Hall elevators with large diagrams of her hopes to open up the rest of Tribeca’s Pier 26. The Economic Development Corp., the agency in charge of city-owned land, is usually in the power position, but on Sept. 17, the corporation sent a representative hat in hand to ask for $17 million to make more improvements to the East River waterfront, including a playground on Pier 42. Fifty million is a far cry from the nearly $2.8 billion federal grant the L.M.D.C. received from Congress after 9/11 to help Downtown rebuild. It is not at all clear that the $50 million is the corporation’s “last” to be allocated. As far back as 2006, it appeared that all of the money had been set aside for
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Downtown Express photo by Dusica Sue Malesevic
Otto Penzler, owner of Manhattan’s last mystery bookstore, has managed to hang on. He said Amazon is “rapacious and evil, but they do in fact do a great job.”
Tribeca whodunit: Battle Amazon & keep a mystery bookstore open BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC ysterious Bookshop’s almost floor-to-ceiling crammed bookshelves — complete with a rolling ladder — would do any library in an Agatha Christie proud. And like Christie’s mysteries featuring bucolic English estates, the Mysterious Bookshop has lasted. For 36 years, the bookstore has withstood Amazon, e-books and competitors to be the last of its kind in Manhattan to exclusively sell mysteries. On a recent sunny Saturday, a steady trickle of customers came into the spacious shop at 58 Warren St. in Tribeca.
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Books crowded tables while a couch and green chair waited patiently in the center of the store to be used. “I like that it is an old-fashioned bookstore — they’re not selling candy, they’re not selling T-shirts. It’s kind of rare these days,” said Bill Hoffmann, a Greenwich Village resident who used to go to Partners & Crime, the mystery bookstore in his neighborhood that closed three years ago. “If this store folds,” he said, “the city is finished.” Otto Penzler, 73, is the owner and force behind the institution. Growing up in the South Bronx, Penzler didn’t read many mysteries, but
the one he did made an impression. “I was in the fourth grade, I remember it vividly,” he said last month during an interview in his 2,400-square-foot store. Seated in the shop’s comfortable brown leather couch across from the children’s nook, Penzler explained how his school had library class, and the first part was devoted to how to properly care for and handle books. In the second half, he said, students were allowed to take any book they wanted off the shelf. He serendipitously took out an anthology that included Sherlock Holmes’ “The Red-Headed League.” (The back wall Continued on page 6
1 MET ROT E CH • NYC 112 01 • COPYRIG HT © 2015 N YC COMMU N ITY MED IA , LLC
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POPE FRANCIS DOWNTOWN Pgs. 20 – 21